Service Worker Caching, PlaybackRate and Blob URLs for Audio and Video on Chrome for Android

This may sound like a sinister Soviet era directive, but in fact it's an important step towards consistent cross-platform audio and video delivery. Chrome on Android will now use the same media stack as desktop Chrome, rather than relying on the underlying platform implementation.

UMP enables you to do a lot:

Cache audio and video with service workers, since media delivery is now implemented directly within Chrome rather than being passed off to the Android media stack.

Use blob URLs for audio and video elements.

Set playbackRate for audio and video.

Pass MediaStreams between Web Audio and MediaRecorder.

Develop and maintain media apps more easily across devices — media works the same on desktop and Android.

UMP took some hard engineering work to implement:

A new caching layer for improved power performance.

Updating a new MediaCodec based video decoder hosted in Chrome's GPU process.

This is another step towards unifying mobile and desktop Chrome. You don't need to change your code, but building a consistent media experience across desktop and mobile should now be easier, since the media stack is the same across platforms. Debugging with Chrome DevTools? Mobile emulation now uses the 'real' audio and video stack.